Aucto Splendore Resurgo

Main menu

Post navigation

Recent Developments

Lately, although my mind certainly has been on past lives (in particular my life as John), I’ve been bereft of anything but the briefest flickers of memory.

Instead, what I’ve had in the last month or two have been dreams and visions that seem to point to the Book of Daniel, a book of the Bible I hadn’t paid much attention to until now.

All I remember of the first dream is that I saw so much flashing, from the Old Testament through to the present day, in such a short time. The name “Daniel” came to mind; I think some (but not all) of the events described in the Book of Daniel may be linked to it.

There was an intervening spirit throughout these ages that broke the surface like a whale breaching the surface of the water, still reflecting the illusion on its wet skin but distinct enough that it could be seen. It moved, and was gone, amorphous, slippery, somewhat camouflaged, very much like what PKD called Zebra (but it was not one of the beasts that arose from the sea in the Book of Daniel because it was not linked to an earthly kingdom but rather, stood in opposition to them).

Then yesterday, I had a vision of five signs arranged in a tableau that I’m still trying to interpret, if indeed it means anything other than the random noise of an overactive imagination.

Across the top of the tableau were four signs which I understood thusly:

A man drinking from a bottle, which I understood to be a reference to Thomas 28: “Jesus said, “I took my stand in the midst of the world, and in flesh I appeared to them. I found them all drunk, and I did not find any of them thirsty. My soul ached for the children of humanity, because they are blind in their hearts and do not see, for they came into the world empty, and they also seek to depart from the world empty.But meanwhile they are drunk. When they shake off their wine, then they will change their ways.”

A bull or a ram, which I took to represent the fertility cults of the ancient Near East, such as the endemic religions of the Babylonians.

A flaming Torah scroll, which I took to mean the Logos.

A dove, which I took curiously to be the dove of the diluvian myth and not the dove of the Holy Spirit.

The fifth sign was at the bottom, as wide as all four of the others taken together. It was a cracked stone slab with the word “KING” carved on it, which I somehow took to represent Nebuchadnezzar as he appeared in Daniel.

The juxtaposition makes no sense, and I’m still trying to figure out why I keep referring to Daniel, a book I really don’t know what to make of. To literalists, it’s a one-to-one account of lives and prophecies of the captivity of the Jews in Babylon; to Bible scholars, it’s one of the earliest of a genre of apocalyptic writings, the same tradition as the various books of Revelation (yes, there is more than one but only one made the final cut). One thing that stands out to me is a repetition of the meme of a holy person in captivity who gains the favor of a king by interpreting their dreams; that meme is also seen in the Joseph story in Genesis.

But as far as Kabbalistic or Gnostic interpretations, I’m still trying to find resources. If any of my readers can point me toward one I would be most grateful as these dreams and visions have me in an odd place.

EDIT: I took a few moments in Gimp to mash up some images and show the tableau more or less as I saw it, though the images as I saw them were more stylized: